


A Drop Fell on the Apple Tree

by Ael



Series: Invictus [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Not Beta Read, Rain, Seizures, Slice of Life, hardly any hurt really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 16:49:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10621059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ael/pseuds/Ael
Summary: Jim and Bones, and a thunderstorm. A moment in time after returning to Earth.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This snippet takes place after chapter 62 of _Out Of the Night That Covers Me_. Reading the previous fic is encouraged but not required. However, it is important to know that due to events of OotNTCM, in which Jim sustained a traumatic brain injury, he sometimes has complex partial seizures.
> 
> Title of the story comes from Emily Dickinson's [Summer Shower](http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/457/).

He comes back to himself slowly, like waking suddenly out of a deep sleep. There's somebody with him, a gentle hand carding through his hair, rubbing soft fingertips against his scalp. His head is resting against something warm and solid, and there's a faint but steady _thud-thud_ in one ear, a constant drum beat that beckons him back towards the soft cottony haze he just came from, and in the distance he can hear a fast-paced pitter-patter, so like the steadfast rhythm against his ear, and it makes him think of something from long ago. Something he hasn't heard for a long time.

 

"You back with me?"

 

The voice is quiet, gentle as the hand still caressing his hair, like the speaker is trying not to startle him with the suddenness of it. He turns his head a little, into that soothing touch, and makes a wordless, questioning noise in his throat. He doesn't feel right, in a way he can't explain, but he's not afraid. Not in the care of these steady hands.

 

He doesn't want to open his eyes, oddly reluctant to let reality intrude upon his safe haven, but he knows he must. The light stings deep into his brain, making him wince against the daylight creeping through a wide picture window, dim though it is through the gray clouds outside.

 

He recognizes the ceiling, even if he can't put a name to why he knows. The same goes for the bed, spacious enough for two fully grown men, and he becomes aware that the constricting feeling around one leg is a tangled bedsheet, twisted around. His head is pillowed against someone's chest, hazel eyes looking at him in concern and no small amount of affection.

 

"Hey, there you are. You had another one."

 

Oh. Now that the man has said so, he can remember feeling this way before, when his head decides that it's had enough and plunges him into a darkness he never remembers, only leaving him with the sensation of climbing his way out of a deep pit, a journey that he can never recall starting. Threads of thought begin to weave together again, slowly assembling the tapestry of his consciousness, folding memory back into coherence.

 

He closes his eyes for a moment, listening to the dual drum beat of Bones' heart and the sound of raindrops splashing against the roof, thrumming against the solar panels and running in thick rivulets down the outer walls and windows, dripping from the eaves. It's a sound he hasn't heard for years, and a memory swims to the surface unbidden, a young boy sitting in a farmhouse, surrounded by wide open fields of wheat, listening to the droning cadence of an Iowa summer storm. A slow rolling rumble of thunder, seeming to take ages to stretch from one side of the sky to the other, lazy and meandering on its way to nowhere. The earthy, fresh scent of clean rain on dry earth, the one they call petrichor, washing away the dust and causing green to bloom against the brown soil.

 

"'s raining," he mumbles, and the hand stroking through his hair resumes its tender path across his head.

 

"Yeah, for a couple hours now. It'll pass soon enough."

 

You don't get rain on a starship. No weather in space, and all that, not as it is planetside anyway. He hasn't heard the gentle rattling of rain against a roof since... Starfleet Medical. Lying in a hospital bed, still recovering from a coma that stole two weeks of his life, that brought him back from the dead, he'd awakened once or twice to the soft patter of raindrops blowing against the windows, speckling the view of the gray sky outside with tiny prisms.

 

He lies here now, recovering again, that same steadfast presence standing watch over him.

 

He opens his eyes and smiles faintly up at Bones, still bleary and woozy, but unafraid. There's nowhere safer he could possibly be. "Don't mind rain," he says, his voice thick and rough, and he lifts a heavy hand to curl his fingers around Bones' arm, warm under his palm.

 

Outside, the gentle rolling thunder traverses across the gray sky, slowly fading beneath the quiet thrumming of the rain.

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to work on the next story in IDIC and for some reason this happened instead. I'm not sorry.


End file.
